Exactly what his bosses expect of him. How is that 'moronic'? You're not supposed to believe anything he says. That would be moronic. You're only expected to buy the products advertised on his show. It's TV, okay? He's there to entertain.

You have to listen to several shows and learn his method before you judge him.

If you can survive listening to more than one of his shows nowadays, then you are either previously brain-damaged, or are seeking to become so. He was tolerable and even somewhat balanced in his early days, but then he went off the deep end and into whatever he is now.

"In fact he even says not to believe him until you do your own research"Unfortunately a lot of people take this to mean what I am saying is true, and you need to prove me wrong. Then you get stuck into conspiracy logic reasoning, where lack of evidence only means the conspiracy is deeper.

For example the Birther Movement.Some Guy Pull out of his ass that Obama wasn't born in the united states, because his father wasn't a native citizen.Demand research, so they demand a copy of the birth certificate.They finally get it, well it could be fake,They find newspaper articles, about his birth,They figure that it was paid to be placed in there.They track it down to the hospital.they assume the hospital was paid off...

For some reason a half white and half black child from a modest middle class family must be groomed to be president of the United States, as a plot for the UN communist to take over the United States.

For average vote Joe, they do not have the research skills to realize they are going down a dead end path, and will research and pull more crazy and bad sourced information.

Well the bitch is once in awhile...and its rare, its like a planetary alignment, he will say something that actually make sense. hell I even agreed with him twice, crazy i know.

The first time was a few years back when they caught that NYC guy with a failed bomb and while the right wing wanted to go "enemy combatant" and take away his rights Beck said "You don't trash the constitution to get the bad guys, we're supposed to be better than that"..I can't find any fault with that statement, you really shouldn't trash the constitution just to get the bad guy. The second time was when there was talk of the US going into Iran and Libya and he said it was "time for the USA to be Switzerland and get the hell out of there"...again, can't find fault with that statement, between the military and the CIA we've been stirring shit all over the planet and it IS time to be Switzerland and stay the fuck out of everyone else's business.

So while I think Beck and Alex Jones and the other "Its all a conspiracy!" nuts are just that every once in a while they actually say something that is true. I guess its like a broken clock being right twice a day, who knows. Most of the time though? Crazy as a loon.

Your eloquently supported position convinced me. After all, what Beck says is nearly as crazy as calling a person an "EVE Online diplomat". And to suggest that the CIA would do anything wrong is just insane.

Have you ever listened to the guy for any period of time? He's been absolutely spot on about many things.

Some of the things he says seems ridiculous when he says them, but a year later? Many have happened.

Bottom line to the Slashdot Crowd... the intelligent Slashdot crowd anyway. Before you form a (very obviously) uninformed opinion, perhaps you should try to listed for two weeks straight. Then at least you have something credible to base it on.

Be the intelligent, scientific crowd you think you are, and try it. Otherwise, you are more of a buffoon than you can comprehend.

Before you form a (very obviously) uninformed opinion, perhaps you should try to listed for two weeks straight.

Why don't you try to read Das Kapital for two weeks straight? It's not enough time to form a reasoned opinion, one only needs an hour or so for that. But it is enough time to warp your sense of reality.

In the words of the Daily Show: "What he says makes sense. And if you don't think about it he makes even more sense."

Glenn Beck is about one thing and one thing only: Glenn Beck. He's not a moron. He's not stupid. He gets paid millions of dollars for spewing conspiracy laced nonsense across the airwaves. And his listeners love him for it.

Sure, any rational thinking person would listen to one show and say, "Wow, that guy is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.". But then again, rational thinking people are n

Take over in what sense? They made emergency loans to much of the car companies that otherwise would have gone bust (leaving mostly just Ford). And mandating health insurance so that you don't have poor contagious sick people walking the streets. There is no take-over there, either. So he was still crazy.

Ford, and they've even admitted this themselves, were just lucky. They had just taken a big re-structuring loan out right before rates and credit availabity tanked. They did well because that allowd them to be the only American auto maker not needing a bail out.

You realize that when you speak like this about a person, you become that which you claim to hate (I guess you would claim to hate Glenn Beck, I don't know). That doesn't bother you at all?

I know the AC title is all about saying some kind of explitive joined with a derogatory ad hominem. But, This is EXACLTY the type of thing he would say about someone else! It's not productive. It just clouds your judgement and only speaks to people who only think like you do.

I know it's slashdot, I know "someone on the internet is wrong". But This was modded "Insightful". Really?

As the right-wing Hate Machine spews its filth over the public spaces, it consistently maintains it's just "calling things as they are", "exercising their free speech" or "avoiding political correctness".

But God forbid someone should call one of them names. Then suddenly out of the woodwork various arbiters of decency appear waving their fingers and going "tut-tut".

No, I've been living under a conservative Christian Democrat government the past 12 years, with a growing racist party in Parliament which actually got to govern in the last cabinet.

The world is not the USA, and your predictable right-wing false equivalencies are tiring.

Well, I can't really accurately reply to the "right wing" in your country since I don't know what country that is. And hell, your "right wing" may truly be "Hate Machines". But this article is about a US based libertarian talk show host who is falsely associated with the "right wing" because he, like all libertarians, favor a small, central government with most of the power given to the states and communities.

Beck is not a "right wing Hate Machine" like what you have described. He is simply, like many lib

Steganography can be far more interesting than that. Especially when a post by DragonTHC on Slashdot means our New York assets, on grasscity.com means Chicago assets and penny-arcade means our Los Angeles assets. A Monday post means that work is going according to schedule, posting at an odd hour (7PM) as opposed to an even hour means that the message is true as opposed to possibly compromised, and the homepage that is linked contains a paragraph that is encrypted and tells me the name of a hotmail address

I'm not sure I get the joke here. The job of the deceased was "foreign service information management officer." I'm trying to imagine how somebody in that position could not work with intelligence services?

EVE Online's players tend to begin to treat it as a lifestyle and many of them develop close friendships and connections to other players and I would not be surprised in the least that someone involved that much in EVE would be chatting with gamer friends practically all the time. And VileRat was associated with GoonSwarm which was a group mainly associated with Something Awful, so its no surprise he'd be chatting with them.

I'm not sure I get the joke here. The job of the deceased was "foreign service information management officer." I'm trying to imagine how somebody in that position could not work with intelligence services?

Perhaps he was the Exchange/Sharepoint/SAN administrator? "Foreign service" is pretty much any State Department employee stationed overseas. "Information Management Officer" sounds like he could be anything from the IT Admin to the filing clerk (if they still have paper files, that is).

"Paranoia strikes deep, into your lives it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid. Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away."

Really. The fine line between clear batshit-crazy paranoia and justifiable concern grows thinner and thinner the deeper down the "terrorists!" Rabbit hole we go. The cited song refered to the last boogeyman: "Commies!", but it fits very well, if eerily, 50 years later with "Terrorists!"

People like Glen Beck just drink the koolaid. Rather than point and laugh about his over the top paranoia, take an honest look at how batshit we are acting in regard to "Terrorists!", where we are scared of plastic knives, exploding underwear, and flamable mouthwash to the point where we grope and tickle old women and 2 year old children as a daily occurance at our borders.

In times like these, agencies like the CIA get ever expanding license to do stupid, batshit crazy stuff to "catch them terrorists", and "make us feel safe!" As such, things like the silly stupid of this story might not actually be as silly stupid as they seem.

But don't forget that the other side was crying "fascists." Then, when that didn't stick, it was "crypto-fascists" and we were expected to believe that everyone in the right secretly wore a Hitler moustache beneath their Klan robes, while they kept up a clean cut facade for the cameras.

And that back and forth, between cries of "Commie!" and cries of "Fascist!," came directly from Joe Stalin's CCCP and the Nazis, when Hitler and he fell out. We just took it into our own politics with very little consideratio

It would be ad-hominem ("about the man"), but not the Ad-Hominem Fallacy if you demonstrated his previous perfidiousness. There's an interesting paper regarding when ad-hominem arguments are not fallacious here [academia.edu].

when was the last time he was relevant? and with regard to his purported comment: thats his job. his job is to say, or do anything to anyone in order to garner enough attention to sell advertising slots. the formula is to find a hot-button item and exploit it. Whether he believes anything he says is irrellevant. He lost his job on Fox News because his ability to draw advertisers plummeted once americans realized the stalinist dystopia he insisted upon never arrived. Sean Hannity, Bill Oreilly, Glenn Beck, and Limbaugh are all designed and employed to keep people interacting with and talking about their respective shows. None have any expertise in anything of a technical nature, ever.

Let's not pretend Beck's critics are left-wing. They may be predominantly Democrats (and other anti-TeaParty people) and disagree on how the power of the state should be applied, but they are as supportive as any of giving the state that power.

I don't get why all these posts that belong on Media Matters or Crooks and Liars show up on Slashdot. Glenn Beck's an idiot and everybody's lying about the embassy attack in Libya. Yea, we get it. Take it somewhere else - this isn't "News for nerds" - it's clickbait. Take it somewhere else.

As a former goon, and former goonfleet pilot I can say how tightknit that

1. something awful is2. goonfleet in particular was.

I am still in shock and disbelief that both get into the news, and vile rat will be deeply missed.

Some back story, before there was 4chan, there was something awful. Goons used to do pranks and raids (far more mild that what 4chan/anonymous eventually became). Goons became named "Goons" because they were Lowtax's "goons" who'd invade forums and crash websites. But there were no LOIC, or any other tools. it was just using the/. effect with malice, e.g. hitting the reload button on a site you didn't like until the pipes clogged, at the same time as every other goon. Back in the day, it was very feasible to clog down the low-rent juggalo, furry, pedo, and other stupid sites somethingawful would target. They also asked eachother for advice. traded stories, made confessions, trolled eachother. There was "goon justice", when goons fucked up a pedophile, scammer, spammer, or other internet lowlife. The also did photoshop contests, made memes, and trolled eachother really hard.

There were also pranks, such as habo hotel, and the like.

The Forums "Goons" had a general dislike for the rest of the internet, and would play internet games with other goons, because they disliked the general population of gamers at the time. Goonfleet stuck out because of how harsh the game was, and how goons when from harrassing people in game, to becoming a serious angry force hell bent on serious stellar conquest. EVE is a game where everyone is a ruthless bastard hell bent on conquest, and people fucked with the goons, they pushed back harder. They kept to themselves and disliked outsiders, and took a dim view on the status quo of the EVE eliete(poopsocking pubbies). Goons made a break for power in 2006 and I am proud to say I was there. Other alliances had players with far more skill points(like level), who where more powerful, but goons had numbers, excellent organization, and teamwork. There was a profound sense of "goon nationalism" in the game that we were out to stake our claim and challenge the status quo. leaders had charisma, and leadership skills, but not as much in game skill points. We bucked the pecking order in favor of our own. We let anyone from Something Awful in, while rejecting the most seasoned non-goon EVE players.

The world hated us, but as goons we reveled in their hatred, and it made us closer, stronger, more determined. We had the numbers and were far far far more ruthless than the worst the game had to offer. EVE is not just played online, its played over instanat message, cell phones, text messages, and even in the real world. When we allied with the Russians, we sent a real life delegation to Russia to visit them in person, and they sent one to NY, to shore up in game ties.

We upset some major long standing alliances who had publicly gone on EVE TV to bash us.(Lokta Voltera, Vertas Imortalis) to bash us and our antics. We went on to terminate them with prejudice.

EVE got serious just about the same time goons were almost at the height of their in game power.

Somewhere around 2005, when the internet started getting really "serious" and pranks and raids started to have legal conotations, site founder, lowtax put a halt to raids and pranks. The sense of community remained. But just a reminder before "Anonymous" was "Leigon", we were "40 thousand screaming goons"

RIP VIle Rat. Here is a speech remedial made on teamspeak before the epic battle of XZH-, of which I was a defender. I recorded this as I listened to.

The Earth is 6,000 (excuse me, 6,016) years old, creation by a deity is a better explanation than evolution by natural selection, homosexuality is a choice and a sin, and women are meant to be subservient and deliver every time they conceive. When a party already believes laughable things like that, it’s hard to tell the sarcasm from the seriousness anymore.

- The U.S. government is indeed looking for missiles to recover, so that no one finds out that we supplied them to terrorists- They find a weapons cache of surface to air missles- Same missiles we supplied during the revolution to take out aircraft.- The CIA agents were forced to call in Stevens, our CIA weapons dealer.- He flies in on short notice and takes an unmarked car to avoid suspicion to meet them- The meeting goes south, he is taken to the closest safe house, which is why he ends up at the poorly secured consulate building.- The message Sean Smith sent to the gaming community was really a message to the CIA telling them they needed help.

I have to go with Occam's Razor here. Or maybe Occam's Meat Axe, since the differences really, really small. But I find it slightly more plausible that Mitt things that his joke is funny than that he hasn't seen Goldfinger.

Pull your head out of your ideological ass. Beck is a fucking mental case, and anyone with two brain cells can see that. Because you're a rabid ideologue doesn't mean you get your own reality. Beck rarely uses sarcasm, he mostly uses paranoid delusions... and it takes another fucking moron to believe his crap and defend him as something other than a fucking idiot.

Glenn Beck has been known to use this device known as "sarcasm" which tends to escape the Aspergers crowd that runs Slashdot.

Isn't everything he says sarcastic?

I have to admit that the right seems to have a very weird sense of humor these days (assuming Romney really was joking about those airplane windows) that seems to go past us feeble-minded libbies. On the other hand, right wing bloviators do tend to say stupid things in all seriousness and then claim they were being sarcastic when they're called on it. I guess that's why they say everything with a smirk, since this expression is so ambiguous with respect to seriousness.

Now here's my point: How many people on this site will insult Glenn Beck, some nut on the radio who has no real power, while giving the White House a free pass?

Good point. Then again most people here are still giving the White House a free pass on Fast and Furious along with Holder and Obama and the killing of 300+ Mexicans a US border agent, a mass murder(most recently discovered and linked at a party of teenagers) [dailycaller.com], or they're blaming Bush still because that's the line the WH is still trying to feed on the narrative. Even though under Bush's program their guns were tracked. Under Obama and Holder they simply let the guns walk away.

Since when are most people here giving that a pass? Most people here tend to think that both sides are fucked up. A lot of people just decide that one is less fucked up and go with the less fucked up one (which goes both ways). But a lot of us just hold on to that they're both fucked up and we're headed down the shitter in the US either way. Personally, I'm the latter: to say that any side is more fucked up than the other is just bickering over which way you want the pineapple being shoved up your ass to be

Even though under Bush's program their guns were tracked. Under Obama and Holder they simply let the guns walk away.

Which brings us to the bigger point... people give the White House something of a pass because Obama isn't THE ONLY PERSON IN THE GOVERNMENT. He doesn't have a say in the minute details of everything... how ridiculous is it to even think that he would? But, the fascist conservatives hate Obama, so they'll lie like son of a bitches EVERY TIME something happens. They tracked the guns under Bush, they tracked the guns under Obama... fucking mental midget ideologues want to lie, however, and make asinine statements like you did.

Right, now it's time to grow up. So, remember Iran-contra? And how the democrats blamed Regan for everything. No? Okay. So remember the last 8 years and oh let's go with the housing crisis. That was obviously all Bush's fault right. Despite the fact that in 2002 and 2003, that the republicans tried to change the rules but were blocked by the democrats. Wait, he was the only person in the government. Now that your little temper tantrum is done, you'd better get your head out of the sand.

Under Obama they were not tracked, the documents received showed that. The real problem that comes back on this is that the democrats themselves are stonewalling and it has become a civil case because the DoJ itself is blocking further investigations into the issue. Now, if you're finished lying to yourself perhaps, just perhaps you learned something today.

If "yes", then why are you whining about Democrats blaming him for it?If "no", then why are blaming Obama for Fast and Furious?

You're complaining about double-standards being applied by liberals while simultaneously using double-standards yourself.

Either the president is responsible for everything that happens in his administration, in which case you had best condemn everyone from Reagan to Roosevelt to Lincoln, or they're not, in which case you have no reason to be condemning Obama.

Whether Reagan is responsible for Iran-Contra, and Obama responsible for Fast and Furious, is an open historical question that will probably not be answered for a very long time.

The question in both cases is "What did the president know, when did he know it, and what did he do about it?" And in both cases, we don't know the answer to any of those questions because all the relevant documents are classified.

1. Of course he's nuts, but do you think it would be impossible for the CIA to use an online game like Eve to communicate in some circumstances?

Right, because there's nothing suspicious about an undercover operative who suddenly needs to contact headquarters firing up a video game. I guess that would be somebody infiltrating the Al Qada's notorious gold farming operation.

Uh.. as many people on Slashdot point out all the time, *LOTS* of people play online games. So what do you do if you are a spy and want to communicate without raising suspicion... do what *LOTS* of other people do and blend in.

James Bond is not a real spy, Joe Blow, the average guy who you pass on the street without even noticing is what a real spy looks like. If it is expected that a white guy in his 20s - 30s and who is kind of nerdy will play video games, then that is an excellent thing for an operative to do so that he blends in with every expected stereotype.

I'm not saying that this particular guy was doing it, but for you to call it ridiculous is patently silly... especially given the credulity of people on this website to every single conspiracy theory that supports the pet-prejudices that are promoted around here.

Lots of people don't play MMORPGs that suck up half their lives. What kind of cover story includes that much time spent on a collective fantasy? Not one that includes actual time spent gathering intelligence.

You mention that James Bond is fiction. That's very true. Real secret agents don't have elaborate schemes for doing ordinary things, like talking to people.

If Obama had called it terrorism immediately, you'd be accusing him of scaremongering. No matter what he does, you'll call it the wrong thing. Why should anyone even care what you think any more? You're openly trying to turn the murder of innocent people into a politcal cudgel. Fuck you.

But the Prez can do very little to create jobs, realistically. Obama may have an easier time creating the Unicorn we all seem to want. Add in a obstructionist, insane House, and the Euro wanting to implode the European Union?

The banks are the Republicans' fault, collectively. They started it, and the whole financial industry precipitated all this.

Housing is a Republican problem too. Along with student loans. Same problem, but that's not at issue here. We are not really too involved in reality, just in avoiding holding our President accountable for a damned thing.

Because, after all, it was like that when he got there. It could be worse. Bush could have left it all for Obama to figure out. Oh,wait...

Let’s cheerfully and ungrudgingly give credit to Barack Obama for approving the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. . ..

While we may not know all the details about and behind this operation, it’s fascinating to see how many of the things that made the success of this operation possible were not so long ago decried by many of the president’s fans and fellow partisans.

For one thing, it apparently would not have happened without those infamous enhanced interrogation techniques — “torture,” according to critics of the Bush administration.

The enhanced interrogation techniques reportedly led to identification of the courier who eventually led our forces to bin Laden’s hiding place. Critics of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques assured us that “torture” could not produce reliable information.

They were probably right that sometimes such techniques yield false information. But the bin Laden operation shows that they can also produce actionable intelligence.

You may remember that many Democrats called for criminal prosecution of CIA interrogators who were acting under orders vetted by legal counsel. Attorney General Eric Holder actually considered bringing such prosecutions.

Fortunately, he decided not to do so — fortunately for the individuals involved but fortunately also for his own reputation. Who would want to be known for prosecuting the people who helped track down bin Laden?

It has also been reported that in hunting down bin Laden our forces relied on intercepted communications. I wonder if any of them included contacts between suspected terrorists abroad and persons in the United States.

This was the “domestic wiretapping” revealed to great acclaim by the New York Times and presented as an intolerable infringement of civil liberties. Given what we know now, it’s a good thing our folks were tuning in.

Obama deserves credit also for employing the Navy SEALs, who are part of the Joint Special Operations Command. It was fashionable a few years ago to call the JSOC “Dick Cheney’s death squad” and “Cheney’s assassination team.”

The assumption behind such criticism was that Bush administration officials were using what they termed the war against terrorism as a smokescreen for persecuting domestic dissidents. But there is not a scrap of evidence that either the Bush administration or the Obama administration was doing anything of the kind. They were too busy trying to protect us.

There was criticism as well of the idea of targeting particular individuals for assassination. But, in ordering the raid on bin Laden’s compound, Obama authorized the killing of bin Laden. And no Miranda warnings first.

This morning, The New York Times offers a lengthy look at President Obama’s relationship with leaders in the Arab world, full of revealing detail. It never quite comes out and explicitly says the president’s approach has failed, but the overall picture is withering and bleak. . . . more . . . [nationalreview.com]

I'm generally bipartisan, and I don't take any issue with the point you're trying to make here (very clearly the President relied on others to "get" Bin Laden; he didn't infiltrate the hideout himself....).

However, the article you pasted is chock full of weasel words, sarcasm, "quotes", and general contempt. It's difficult - very difficult - to take articles like this seriously; at least for those of us who are what "moderate" used to be. Why don't people ever seem to understand that the facts speak fo

Blah blah blah. No president does anything single-handedly. Lincoln didn't tear through the Confederacy like an action hero. FDR didn't paradrop into Nazi Germany. Obama didn't pull the literal trigger on Osama. But it was his decision to refocus efforts on finding OBL, it was his decision to go with troops on the ground rather than an airstrike, it was his decision to keep the Pakistanis out of the loop. All of those turned out to be the right choices, and Obama deserves credit for that.

All you Republicans claiming the credit should go exclusively to the military, ask yourself this: If the mission had ended with a dozen dead SEALs instead of a dead terrorist, would you be placing the blame solely on the military?